I have planted quite a few tulips in our garden over the years and over 100 daffodils. Sadly I do not get to see that many when spring rolls around. I believe the squirrels dine out on the tulips; I’m not sure if they eat the daffodils too. I do get a few red tulips each year which have been blooming ever since we moved here so I can’t take any credit for keeping them alive!

I stamped this lovely outline stamp on hot pressed watercolour paper and coloured it with peerless watercolour paints. The deckled edge is left when I cut up the large sheets of watercolour paper I buy. Sometimes it makes a nice design detail.

I used a hand lettered sentiment tied on with some hemp twine and framed it all in red to make the tulips pop.

Wildflowers again today because I love the way this stamp creates such a pretty image when wet and blurred. I left the blue out of the mix this time and stuck with purples. Before stamping the flowers I painted a pale sky on my watercolour panel by adding broken china distress stain to one end of a piece of wet hot pressed watercolour paper then tilting it so the colour drained down into the panel. This technique made some areas blue and others pale like clouds.

Once the sky was dry I inked only the tops of the flower stalks in milled lavender stain, added a few dabs of dusty concord and stamped half way up the panel. I inked again and stamped further down, then to fill the bottom of the panel I inked with the purples and green on the stems. I spritzed both the stamp and the paper lightly before stamping.

Today’s card features a hand painted flower and a hand lettered sentiment. I am open to suggestions as to what type of flower it is; it looks like it could be a dahlia, or perhaps a peony or pink cornflower. I am also a bit hazy on what I used to paint it – sorry – again! It was just a painting exercise that turned out looking like a real flower so I decided to turn it into a card. It could be distress stain or peerless watercolours. I matted the flower panel in a teal to match the leaves then popped a handlettered sentiment on a die cut tag.

Hope you are having a delightful day.
By the way The Foiled Fox is having a St Patrick’s Day sale this weekend, go check it out. Foiled Fox kindly sent me the Peerless watercolours that may or may not have been used on this card. They also sent me the beautiful nib holder that definitely was used to write that sentiment.

I’m sharing some shimmer today. Finetec artist mica pearl watercolours are very shimmery particularly on a black base. I worked on Neenah epic black cardstock and started by embossing the new outline image ‘gladsome’ in clear powder. The finetec pearl watercolour set has twelve colours so I chose a few and a small round watercolour brush to paint inside the lines.

It is hard to capture all the shimmer and shine in a photo but the mica pearl paint looks lovely as it catches the light. This is the type of card you need to tilt back and forth to see all its prettiness. I wanted to keep my sentiment co-ordinated so I used a nib pen and the same violet paint used on the petals. This is my second card with the ‘gladsome’ stamp; I like to get a range of different looks from one stamp. I think this one will be appearing again.

It’s colouring time! Kathy Racoosin has launched a new 30 day colouring challenge which is running for the whole of March. To find out more about it check out her Youtube or her blog. This is her 7th colouring challenge; there is no pressure to colour every day, but you can if you want. I never manage all thirty days but I like to participate as often as possible.

The new release from Penny Black just happens to have a whole bunch of ‘colouring book’ style stamps; ‘Burst of Blooms’ is one of them. I chose to go dramatic with gold on black. The gold paints are from the Gansai Tambi Starry Colors set which has five different golds and a pearly silver. I embossed the image in clear powder on black cardstock then painted with three different golds.

I also added some tiny gold dots around my image and used the same gold paint to hand letter a sentiment.

This vintage looking map card is for my husband’s birthday today. I am not suggesting he is vintage, far from it as he is only one week older than me! I used the world map background stamp from Darkroom Door and distress stains to give it an aged look. I began by stamping the image on hot pressed watercolour paper in versafine onyx black. Versafine is a pigment ink so I knew it wouldn’t bleed when I added stain and water over the top. I added vintage photo distress stain over most of the panel first then followed it with more distress stain and water (colours listed below) loosely filling the oceans in blue and the land in yellow and green.

When the panel dried I added some water splatter and stain splatter. Up until this point the process had been fairly quick but then I started playing with sentiment ideas. The one on the card is probably attempt no.217! I went through several different wordings and a couple of paper types and nibs before I resorted to something simple. Once I had written it satisfactorily I dropped water on it, extra stain and added a little postmark which just happens to be from a place where I lived the year before we were married. Sweet words like “I’d travel the world with you” were not to be. Don’t get me wrong I would travel the world with him and did travel from one side to the other 16 years ago. My simple wish with a pointed pen and ink and lots of love!

I’m still having fun with the African stamps from Darkroom Door, this time combining a loose watercoloured background with a sharp silhouetted tree in the foreground. I stamped the ‘tribal’ background first on watercolour paper in several colours of distress ink. Once the whole pattern was stamped I painted over it with water and the colours blended from into each other.

I let the background dry completely before dropping some water strategically here and there. When water comes in contact with distress ink it reacts and dilutes the ink. By letting the water sit for a minute then dabbing it up with a paper towel I was able to create light patches which look a bit like lights in an already abstract sky.

I stamped the tree over the ‘sky’ once it dried then painted the ground with black soot distress stain. My sentiment, inspired by the ‘watermark lights’ was handwritten in McCaffery’s Penmans black ink.